President Trump has been plenty busy during his first two months in office. Too busy, it seems, to pay much attention to something that will have the most enduring impact on the country for the next decade.

I’m talking about the 2020 census, which is the constitutionally required once-a-decade head count of Americans that is used to parcel out hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars to local governments and — even more important — determine how many members each state deserves in the House of Representatives.

Plans for the census of 2020 — also known as the decennial census — are now under way. And, according to a government watchdog group, the planning isn’t going well at all.

Let me show the importance of this in a different way.

One of the very first things the Obama administration did upon taking office in 2009 was to try to have the Census Bureau report to the White House and not to Congress. Why?

In addition to the things I just mentioned, the Census Bureau is the keeper of many of Washington’s economic statistics.

And if you control the stats, you control what people are led to believe about the economy.

It was a massive fight that was well covered in the media.

The White House’s effort failed. But the 2010 decennial census was that important to former President Barack Obama.

So what’s going on this time?

The Census Bureau is trying to save money on the 2020 survey, which cost the government about $13 billion to conduct in 2010. Estimates for the 2020 survey are nearly $18 billion if the survey is done the same way it was in 2010.

As I’ve written before, the bureau thinks it can get costs down to $12.5 billion “by implementing a number of innovations.” That’s where it gets tricky because the Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General, which controls Census, doesn’t believe those numbers.

And Carol Rice, assistant inspector general for economic and statistical program assessment, said as much in a report she issued two weeks ago.

The big problem, Rice wrote in the March 16 report, is that the Census Bureau seems to be underestimating the cost of follow-up interviews when it can’t catch people in their homes the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth time bureau workers try.

“The current cost estimate contains assumptions that underestimate nonresponse follow-up costs,” Rice wrote. Maybe even more crucial, she questioned the quality of the data being gathered and the security with which that information is handled.

“Finally,” she said, “we identified training limitations, which potentially impact the quality and protection of household data collected by enumerators.”

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Enumerators are the census workers who go house-to-house collecting data. A few years ago The Post documented an instance in which one of these enumerators was fudging data that went into the nation’s unemployment statistics.

Further investigation found instances of falsification in all six Census offices.

The bureau not only collects economic data but also statistics on crime, education and other important issues.

To save money on the 2020 decennial census, the agency plans to use new methods in canvassing houses, including going door-to-door at times of day when people are likely to be home. It will also guess at details of some people, instead of conducting an interview.

The cost-cutting measures for the 2020 census were started under the Obama administration and don’t reflect recent cutbacks to the Commerce Department and Census Bureau budgets announced by Trump.

All of this is happening under a lame duck Census Bureau boss, John Thompson. He wasn’t reappointed by Obama when his contract ran out in December. He can stay in the job for up to a year.

Trump might want to carefully consider who he puts in Thompson’s place. The job is that important.